My girlfriend and I are saving up for a house. This means that I need to be spending less and saving more. This note reminds me of where my priorities should lie.

Something to read. Keep me fit, keep me healthy, keep me bendy, and keep my ass on the couch.

Here in a mere ten panels, Chris Hadfield, Commander on the International Space Station, tells you how to get what you want, how to live your life and how to make your dreams come true.

You can read it in 30 seconds.
You can take the rest of your life to implement it.

It really is that easy. Everything else is just some form of mental or physical masturbation that will get you nowhere.

The drawings are by the wonderful site, Zen Pencils, so all credit to the artist and Commander Hadfield.

You can follow Chris on Twitter here, and you can follow me here.

Bon appetit and good luck!

Just as you can’t allow the streams to cross in Ghostbusters, you can’t get your Star Trek peanut butter in someone else’s Star Wars chocolate.
Don’t mix your nerd movie metaphors, Mr. President because all you’re going to do is piss off fans of both.
Pick a franchise, embrace it, learn their nerd-speak and then go for it.

Someone out there, teach the President of your homeworld, Usul.

Sounds like a pretty damn good deal, right?

But is it backed by science?

Yes it is.

Here’s an article to give you the overview.

Here’s the BBC show “Horizon” that takes you in-depth behind the science and experiments that prove this works.

If you can, watch the video as soon as possible, because for some reason the BBC has been issuing take down notices for this life saving show.

I want all my fans and friends and loved ones to be healthy and happy and living a long, love-filled life.
Go for it!

I know that back when I was first a bookseller, than an Assistant Manager for Waldenbooks, that we sold a gazillion of these books.
I considered them to be the Harlequin Romance for the 12-15 set.
They came out like clockwork, and the girls (and their parents) knew when a new one was coming out, and we better damn well have enough on hand to meet demand.

I find it fascinating that Boesky seemed to live a double life, paralleling the two twins. Working on her PhD during the week and writing about boys and cars and girls and love on the weekends.
But she wanted to write, she needed to pay the bills, so she hunkered down and got shit done.

More SVH ghostwriter stories can be found here, and here, and here.

Enjoy this trip down memory lane!

I AM A LAZY COOK.

But all of this is a digression as to why my long lost love for Sam The Cooking Guy has suddenly come back to life.

Why, pray tell, do I love Sam The Cooking Guy, because he told Hoda and Kathie Lee to Shut The Fuck Up while he was trying to talk and cook and explain his recipe.

Of course, they hated THAT.
But I LOVED it, because those two drunken shrews deserve to be told to shut up at every single opportunity.
That is all.

For those who are morbidly curious, I actually recorded the first ten chapters of “Resurrection Angel” in audiobook format.
You can download them for free (and hear my squeaky little/sexy deep voice) here.

Bon appetit, my friends!

While I have nothing against good, honest work to provide for yourself and your loved ones, I don’t think that we should turn into some sort of automaton that does nothing but work, eat and sleep.
I believe that there has to be a time when we literally do nothing, and meditation seems to fit that description perfectly. You sit down, close your eyes, and there you go. Nothing.

The third reason for my fascination with meditation is that it seemed to offer an altered state when practiced correctly. It seemed to provide a vibration, buzz or feeling within your body and mind that was akin to some sort of drug, only you could not get arrested for possessing it. It was a clean, natural high.

With this altered perception, this high, I also thought that it might lead to some interesting intellectual and creative breakthroughs and I was eager for those as well, as I was also suffering from writers block due to the above conditions.

In short, I was scared, depressed, suicidal and wasn’t writing a damn word.
The Xanax that my doctor prescribed for me did well with panic attacks, but it was only masking the symptoms and allowing me to move from numbing task to numbing task from day to day.
I was existing, but I wasn’t living. Trust me when I say that there’s a big difference between the two.

It was about this time that I heard that noted visionary director David Lynch was into Transcendental Meditation.
Now David Lynch, I think we can all agree, is a man with a certain vision. A certain way of seeing the world. He’s said that he attributes TM with keeping him calm and keeping him creative.

I liked that!

So I decided to investigate Transcendental Meditation.
I knew that The Beatles did it, and their leader, or guru was a crazy little dude, but that’s all I really knew. Around this time, Lynch was making big news with his new foundation. He wants to teach EVERYONE how to meditate. How can you be against a foundation that wants world peace? It’s difficult.

But then, in the midst of my research, I came across a film called David Wants To Fly and watched it.
This, of course, as you can gather from the trailer, adds a new level of crazy to the project and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I just wanted to get a taste of what Lynch experienced, but I didn’t want to involve any crazy guru worship, or spend $1,500 to learn it.
That’s right.
Fifteen Hundred Dollars.

So I decided to let Google take care of this whole thing for me and found a TM alternative that didn’t want a truckload of my money and wasn’t going to teach me how to ‘fly’.
I found Natural Stress Relief.

$25 later, and I learned how to meditate via a mantra, and also had some good science behind the process.
I like my woo-woo to at least have a little bit of science behind it, like Herbert Benson’s “The Relaxation Response”, which actually used experienced TM meditators as their test subjects.
Interesting.
So, for either the cost of a book, or the cost of a MP3 and PDF download, you can learn what The Beatles and David Lynch learned.
Sit down for 20 minutes in the morning, and then 20 minutes in the evening, say your mantra, and get blissed out, calmed down and creative as hell.

Does everyone have the talent?
Or are we just a bunch of narcissists, disconnected from each other by the technology that we use to create art that will bring us closer together?

As someone who has done this, but who has also paid his dues, I don’t know what the correct answer is.
I do know that I am weary of this endless cycle of hype and destruction.
The critics, the bloggers, discover someone or something, proclaim it to be The Next Big Thing, and then 5 minutes later, attack that same product or creation or creator and tear them down, walking away from the burning husk to tap the shoulder of The Next Big Thing.

No easy answers.
Technology levels the playing field, but perhaps some folks aren’t that good to begin with and shouldn’t even be handed the ball.
Watch it and discuss amongst yourself.

I’ll be over here, trying to ignore the buzz, the hype, the social media cacophony, and trying to write my next book.

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

For those of you on my RSS feed, here is a direct link to the film.